I need to get a life. Doesn’t matter whose. I’ve had heroin in my blood, cocaine in my sinuses, and a Greek gymnast in the back of an armored personnel carrier – but for the ultimate pick-me-up, you can’t beat soul power.
There’s a door behind the racks at the back of Rosa’s office. I’ve never gone through it, never even been tempted. Rosa’s business interests extend far deeper than prophecy and the garment trade, and I know enough to know that I don’t want to know just how deep. Rosa, after squinting at me for a few moments with those slitty cat-eyes of hers, bounds off the desk and slinks into that other room. She returns a few seconds later with a plastic baggie in her mouth.
I take the baggie from her. My hands feel numb; I give up on the twist-tie and just tear the plastic. I shake a single shiny dime into my palm. I squeeze.
Yesyesyesfuckittyyes!
A good butcher can sell every part of a pig but the squeal. Rosa’s better than any butcher. Departing souls tend to leave a bit of themselves behind, and she has perfected a process for skimming off the residue from the bodies she buys. Judging by that tiny taste, I’d say she’s got about three percent of a human life stashed inside my pretty new dime. Just the thing for a fellow who may, if things don’t go perfectly hotsy-totsy tonight, find himself needing all the life he can get.
“Ta, Rosa old girl.” I scruff the back of her head. She mrawrs and heads for the exit – politeness and old friendships are one thing, but I wouldn’t want a doomed chap loitering in my parlor either. I grab my suit and follow her up the stairs. I slam the trap door behind me. “Suppose I’d best be going, what? Oh, but I must take old Tom there with me. I’m only renting him, don’t you know.”
Rosa waggles her tail in the air, gathers herself, and leaps up onto the altar. From there she springs to the shapely shoulder of the body she was wearing when she answered the door. Instantly the dark-eyed girl’s corpse, which had been standing quietly with a blank look on its face, is once more alive and luscious. The empty eyes become the eyes that ten generations of fearful villagers sewed closed before giving ten successive martyr’s pyres to Santa Rosa de Izquierda, patroness of the Wicked Truth. I shiver.
The cat, suddenly un-possessed, loses its footing and tumbles towards the tile. It rights itself in time, lands on all fours, and sets to licking itself. Cool little bastard, it wants me to believe that dying in a dusty street and being resurrected in a candlelit temple are about what it expected from a Tuesday. I stoop and gather it up under my arm.
“I’ll owe you for the Old Black,” I tell Rosa. “Put it on my tab, what?” We both know that she may not have to wait long to collect - in the event of my death, she gets whatever’s left of my body afterwards. I’ve got a tattoo that says so. Treat me right, you may get to see it.
Rosa nods and escorts me to the door. She plucks a night rose, red as a whore’s kiss, from one of the sticky black vines that coat the inside of her home. She hangs it on my undershirt by the thorns. “Come back in one piece, my little Spex,” she says. “And don’t develop any new bad habits, si? Junkies are so uninteresting.”
“I promise,” I say. She’s worried about me getting strung out on the life she slipped me. She’s right to be concerned; once your body decides that it’s used to being 100.5% alive, every waking moment that you spend at baseline normal stretches into a weak-tea eternity that makes you wish you could be bothered to kill yourself. Once, and only once, I allowed myself to get hooked. My buzz ran out just as I was about to knock on her door to beg another hit; she found me looking up at the sky, trying to work up the energy to open my mouth so that if it rained I might manage to drown. “Cross my heart. Hope not to die.”
I have some fond recollections of staring up at Rosa's ceiling, but my brush with life-addiction is not one of them. There’s only one way to kick that nasty little habit: cold turkey. I remember lying on her altar, jumper-cabled to some vagrant she'd hastily procured, as she pulled the dagger from my chest.
I pat my pocket, where I fancy I can feel the dime throbbing against my leg. “Cheeri-o, then.”
26.6.09
19.6.09
I-I-X
First card is the Devil, pulling on your heels.
Second card is an angel, who holds you by a rope.
Third card is the rope.
Rosa spears my first card on her foreclaw. This is my worst-case scenario, the fate to most be feared. She turns it over. A naked man, a naked woman, entwined in inseparable embrace. The Lovers.
Rosa seems to shrug. Hard to tell with a cat, of course, but I’m as nonplussed as she is. The Lovers is one of the Major Arcana, heavy-duty juju but one of the most benign cards in the deck. Only amateurs and movie producers think that the Tarot is some sort of inscrutable oracle, speaking mysteries and riddles – The Lovers means just what you’d think it would. Which is why I’m a bit disturbed to see it representing my worst-possible fate in a situation that involves transdimensional gangsters, lost gods, and dear brother Adrian. If things go bad, I can expect a jolly sight worse than a broken heart or a dose of clap. The appearance of The Lovers can mean only one thing: play this right, Spex old boy, or you’re fucked.
Well then. On to Mister Card Number Two. What’s the best I can look forward to? I’m keeping my fingers crossed for something dull, a five of staves or a three of cups. At this point I’d accept a six or seven of pentacles – I don’t need to take any profit or pleasure from this evening’s festivities, just let me get out in one piece.
Rosa’s claw comes down. Flip.
Cats can’t smile. Neither, at this moment, can I. The only grin in Rosa’s office belongs to a gentleman with a pale horse and a scythe, and he’s grinning straight at Yours Truly. A second Major Arcanum has crept into my fate. My best-case scenario is no more complicated than its worrisome predecessor: Death means death. If I’m lucky – really, really lucky – someone is going to die tonight.
It’s rare for me to be sweating at this point in the reading. The third card is just advice – it’s the difference between the first two fates, what I can do to avoid the first in favor of the second, and it’s generally pretty obvious. Many horrifying fates can be avoided simply by not being a fathead. On this occasion, however, I want specifics. I want to … what’s it that the poet says? Tum-te-tum, although the best is bad, sod off and do the best you can under the circumstances. The best is looking pretty sticky right now, so I’ve got precious little room for error.
“Alright, Rosa old girl,” I say. “Let me have it.”
The hackles are standing up on Rosa's back. Not a good sign, when a woman who’s survived more deaths than I’ve had hot dinners is looking edgy. Nevertheless, she’s a professional. She hooks a claw under my last card and pops it into the air. It lands face-up, but turned in the wrong direction. The text is upside-down with respect to where I’m standing, which makes the chap on the card look right-side-up. He’s smiling at me – not a friendly grin, like Mr. Death’s, but the inscrutable pleasantness of a fellow who’s either bought you a pony or poisoned your tea.
The Hanged Man.
The martyr, the traitor. Sacrifice, surrender. Victory through defeat, success through failure, strength through helplessness. A smug little bastard dangling by his ankle, mocking me. My third Major Arcanum in a three card spread – and the big secret, the big clue to help me avoid big trouble, is telling me that I can only win by losing.
I am doomed. I am confused. And I am going to be eating dinner with my brother tonight.
“Rosa?” I say. “Do you remember when you tried to string me out on that Old Black Magic? When you gave me that sweet first taste, and I had to shoot heroin for a month to come down? When I swore I’d hunt you down and kill you properly if you ever gave it to me again?” I sigh. “Gimme.”
Second card is an angel, who holds you by a rope.
Third card is the rope.
Rosa spears my first card on her foreclaw. This is my worst-case scenario, the fate to most be feared. She turns it over. A naked man, a naked woman, entwined in inseparable embrace. The Lovers.
Rosa seems to shrug. Hard to tell with a cat, of course, but I’m as nonplussed as she is. The Lovers is one of the Major Arcana, heavy-duty juju but one of the most benign cards in the deck. Only amateurs and movie producers think that the Tarot is some sort of inscrutable oracle, speaking mysteries and riddles – The Lovers means just what you’d think it would. Which is why I’m a bit disturbed to see it representing my worst-possible fate in a situation that involves transdimensional gangsters, lost gods, and dear brother Adrian. If things go bad, I can expect a jolly sight worse than a broken heart or a dose of clap. The appearance of The Lovers can mean only one thing: play this right, Spex old boy, or you’re fucked.
Well then. On to Mister Card Number Two. What’s the best I can look forward to? I’m keeping my fingers crossed for something dull, a five of staves or a three of cups. At this point I’d accept a six or seven of pentacles – I don’t need to take any profit or pleasure from this evening’s festivities, just let me get out in one piece.
Rosa’s claw comes down. Flip.
Cats can’t smile. Neither, at this moment, can I. The only grin in Rosa’s office belongs to a gentleman with a pale horse and a scythe, and he’s grinning straight at Yours Truly. A second Major Arcanum has crept into my fate. My best-case scenario is no more complicated than its worrisome predecessor: Death means death. If I’m lucky – really, really lucky – someone is going to die tonight.
It’s rare for me to be sweating at this point in the reading. The third card is just advice – it’s the difference between the first two fates, what I can do to avoid the first in favor of the second, and it’s generally pretty obvious. Many horrifying fates can be avoided simply by not being a fathead. On this occasion, however, I want specifics. I want to … what’s it that the poet says? Tum-te-tum, although the best is bad, sod off and do the best you can under the circumstances. The best is looking pretty sticky right now, so I’ve got precious little room for error.
“Alright, Rosa old girl,” I say. “Let me have it.”
The hackles are standing up on Rosa's back. Not a good sign, when a woman who’s survived more deaths than I’ve had hot dinners is looking edgy. Nevertheless, she’s a professional. She hooks a claw under my last card and pops it into the air. It lands face-up, but turned in the wrong direction. The text is upside-down with respect to where I’m standing, which makes the chap on the card look right-side-up. He’s smiling at me – not a friendly grin, like Mr. Death’s, but the inscrutable pleasantness of a fellow who’s either bought you a pony or poisoned your tea.
The Hanged Man.
The martyr, the traitor. Sacrifice, surrender. Victory through defeat, success through failure, strength through helplessness. A smug little bastard dangling by his ankle, mocking me. My third Major Arcanum in a three card spread – and the big secret, the big clue to help me avoid big trouble, is telling me that I can only win by losing.
I am doomed. I am confused. And I am going to be eating dinner with my brother tonight.
“Rosa?” I say. “Do you remember when you tried to string me out on that Old Black Magic? When you gave me that sweet first taste, and I had to shoot heroin for a month to come down? When I swore I’d hunt you down and kill you properly if you ever gave it to me again?” I sigh. “Gimme.”
12.6.09
I-I-IX
I stroke the top of Santa Rosa de Izquierda’s head and scratch behind her ear. She purrs, then jumps onto my shoulder and digs in her claws. This ought to tell you everything you need to know about Rosa.
“Steady on there, old girl,” I say. “I can’t very well pull up the door with you fastened to my bally arm, now, can I? Fuck off.”
She gives me a needly squeeze and leaps off onto the altar. I, because I was fool enough to let Rosa play kitty-cat before I got her to help me, must now heave up a bloody great stone slab all by myself. I stoop to grab the little fingerholds in the floor. I strain.
“Ha-bloody-ha.” I glare up at Rosa from my undignified spot on the ground. She’s sitting on the altar, doing the feline equivalent of laughing her arse off. Now I recall that her last body was a former luchadora – the new meat must have called for an adjustment of the counterweights. The trapdoor yawns, and from the staircase below a greenish fluorescence belches into the candlelit room. The little minx bounces from her perch to my crotch, and thence down the stairs. I rise, dust myself off, and follow.
Above ground, Rosa is la curandera, the witch-woman, patroness of the Wicked Truth. Downstairs, however, she’s really quite interesting. I first met her while I was practicing Voudoun, and even though I’ve mastered it now we still keep in touch. A chap in my position can’t have too many friends, or too many good suits. Rosa is the former, and churns the latter out by the dozens, thanks to this little subterranean sweat-shop of hers. As I jaunt down the stairs I hear a whining, buzzing chorus, like a room full of sewing machines. Rosa waits expectantly for me to open the door at the bottom for her. I turn the knob - on the other side waits a room full of sewing machines.
Perhaps I do Rosa an injustice in calling this place a sweatshop. The air is hellish-hot, but the dead don’t sweat, and the ranked rows of corpses don’t seem to mind. Their eyelids are sewn shut over gold coins, their lips are stapled around mouthfuls of snake flesh and saltpeter. Right now they’re getting ahead of the game, churning out knockoffs of a dress that Rosa’s made for the dewy blonde from ‘Gossip Girl’.
The original is hanging from a beam in Rosa’s little office. I offer it the tribute it deserves. “Smashing, Rosa,” I say. “It’ll hit the tabloids before it hits the floor of her producer’s limo. Where’s my suit?”
She goes nosing in among the racks that are triple-parked in the corner of her subterranean factory that she’s walled off against the noise of the sewing machines. “Mawr,” she says, and I reach for the hanger. I’m careful not to look to closely at the simple lines and understated sheen of what lurks beneath the plastic. If I look, I’ll gush, and that will just embarrass both of us.
Rosa’s suits don’t violate the $100 rule. Not because I don’t pay for them – although I don’t, except occasionally in blood, sweat and tears – but because they are priceless. When I see dear brother Adrian this evening, he will be wearing something designed in Milan and born on Saville Row, with a price tag that more usually applies to real estate. In the presence of this suit, sewn by a zombie in a DC basement, Adrian’s will unravel with shame.
“Ta, old girl.” I hang the evening’s costume next to the cover of the next ‘Us Weekly’. “One more bit of business. I need a reading, and you’re the only one in town I trust besides me.”
She accepts the compliment with feline grace. That is to say, she ignores it utterly and sets to clawing the hell out of a bolt of linen. When she’s finished, she noses open a supply cupboard and scrambles up onto one of the shelves. She roots around at the back and comes out with a rubber-banded tarot deck between her teeth. Nothing fancy here. No frills, no candles, no smoke and mirrors. Just a sneak peek at whatever fresh hell awaits yours truly in the coming hours.
Out of respect for Rosa’s condition, I remove the rubber band and set the deck in a spot on her green industrial metal desk that isn’t covered with drawings and snippings. She hops up and muddles it about with a forepaw, slopping the deck into a puddle of loose cards before reforming it. I prefer a riffle to a wash shuffle for the tarot, but then I’ve got people-hands.
Rosa flicks her tail. She closes her slitty green eyes and extends a single claw. She slides one card from the top of the deck onto the desk, face down. A second card. A third. This is fate. Rosa uses a modified three-card spread -- not the half-assed past-present-future tripe that tourists get on the boardwalk, but a potent short-range illuminator. Card number one is the worst-case scenario. Card number two is the best possible outcome. Card number three represents what’s going to decide between the two.
Flip, flip, flip. Fuck.
“Steady on there, old girl,” I say. “I can’t very well pull up the door with you fastened to my bally arm, now, can I? Fuck off.”
She gives me a needly squeeze and leaps off onto the altar. I, because I was fool enough to let Rosa play kitty-cat before I got her to help me, must now heave up a bloody great stone slab all by myself. I stoop to grab the little fingerholds in the floor. I strain.
“Ha-bloody-ha.” I glare up at Rosa from my undignified spot on the ground. She’s sitting on the altar, doing the feline equivalent of laughing her arse off. Now I recall that her last body was a former luchadora – the new meat must have called for an adjustment of the counterweights. The trapdoor yawns, and from the staircase below a greenish fluorescence belches into the candlelit room. The little minx bounces from her perch to my crotch, and thence down the stairs. I rise, dust myself off, and follow.
Above ground, Rosa is la curandera, the witch-woman, patroness of the Wicked Truth. Downstairs, however, she’s really quite interesting. I first met her while I was practicing Voudoun, and even though I’ve mastered it now we still keep in touch. A chap in my position can’t have too many friends, or too many good suits. Rosa is the former, and churns the latter out by the dozens, thanks to this little subterranean sweat-shop of hers. As I jaunt down the stairs I hear a whining, buzzing chorus, like a room full of sewing machines. Rosa waits expectantly for me to open the door at the bottom for her. I turn the knob - on the other side waits a room full of sewing machines.
Perhaps I do Rosa an injustice in calling this place a sweatshop. The air is hellish-hot, but the dead don’t sweat, and the ranked rows of corpses don’t seem to mind. Their eyelids are sewn shut over gold coins, their lips are stapled around mouthfuls of snake flesh and saltpeter. Right now they’re getting ahead of the game, churning out knockoffs of a dress that Rosa’s made for the dewy blonde from ‘Gossip Girl’.
The original is hanging from a beam in Rosa’s little office. I offer it the tribute it deserves. “Smashing, Rosa,” I say. “It’ll hit the tabloids before it hits the floor of her producer’s limo. Where’s my suit?”
She goes nosing in among the racks that are triple-parked in the corner of her subterranean factory that she’s walled off against the noise of the sewing machines. “Mawr,” she says, and I reach for the hanger. I’m careful not to look to closely at the simple lines and understated sheen of what lurks beneath the plastic. If I look, I’ll gush, and that will just embarrass both of us.
Rosa’s suits don’t violate the $100 rule. Not because I don’t pay for them – although I don’t, except occasionally in blood, sweat and tears – but because they are priceless. When I see dear brother Adrian this evening, he will be wearing something designed in Milan and born on Saville Row, with a price tag that more usually applies to real estate. In the presence of this suit, sewn by a zombie in a DC basement, Adrian’s will unravel with shame.
“Ta, old girl.” I hang the evening’s costume next to the cover of the next ‘Us Weekly’. “One more bit of business. I need a reading, and you’re the only one in town I trust besides me.”
She accepts the compliment with feline grace. That is to say, she ignores it utterly and sets to clawing the hell out of a bolt of linen. When she’s finished, she noses open a supply cupboard and scrambles up onto one of the shelves. She roots around at the back and comes out with a rubber-banded tarot deck between her teeth. Nothing fancy here. No frills, no candles, no smoke and mirrors. Just a sneak peek at whatever fresh hell awaits yours truly in the coming hours.
Out of respect for Rosa’s condition, I remove the rubber band and set the deck in a spot on her green industrial metal desk that isn’t covered with drawings and snippings. She hops up and muddles it about with a forepaw, slopping the deck into a puddle of loose cards before reforming it. I prefer a riffle to a wash shuffle for the tarot, but then I’ve got people-hands.
Rosa flicks her tail. She closes her slitty green eyes and extends a single claw. She slides one card from the top of the deck onto the desk, face down. A second card. A third. This is fate. Rosa uses a modified three-card spread -- not the half-assed past-present-future tripe that tourists get on the boardwalk, but a potent short-range illuminator. Card number one is the worst-case scenario. Card number two is the best possible outcome. Card number three represents what’s going to decide between the two.
Flip, flip, flip. Fuck.
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